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Greetings and welcome to my post. It is December 2014 and this is the time of the year in which we pause and focus on giving gifts to one another. As you know, all the big retail shops & internet shops are hoping you will buy, buy, and buy all the wonderful discounts on various items they have posted on their respected websites. So it is December and it is Christmas and it is natural to focus on buying someone an item as a gift.

So let me ask you to consider an alternative gift to someone you love or someone who is important to you this year that you cannot buy on line, at a retail store, or any other half dozen places in which you shop. This year let me invite you to consider giving these four gifts: Love, Honesty, Faithfulness, and Compassion.

For this post, I want you to consider giving the gift of faithfulness. What comes to mind when you consider faithfulness? How do you define faithfulness: trust, confidence, assuredness, conviction, truth, certainty, performance, earned? In your most important relationships, can you demonstrate to the other person that you can be faithful, someone who can be trusted, depended upon, believed in, and reassurance that you will be there?

If I were to gather five of your closest people in your life, spouse, family or friends, and I were to ask them to describe you or your reputation, would one of the words be faithful and trustworthy? What evidence would they have to share with me that you have proven over the years to be someone who can be trusted? Would you spouse or significant other say that with your eyes, your time, your heart, and your focus, that you have not cheated on them nor have given them any reason not to trust you?

When you give the gift of faithfulness to your most important people and to your most important relationships, you are giving a gift to them that goes straight to the heart of the matter. As you know, our society practices the opposite. Being unfaithful, cheating, not trusting, not committing, keeping your options open, saying with your lips you will be faithful but your actions don’t show it: these are some of the character traits in which our current society is practicing. Lying people always get caught sooner or later and the thought of not being faithful to people or to other aspects of life really does show the lack of integrity our society values. Heck, they even glorified this them with a movie about ten years ago called ‘Unfaithful.’

So be a different person and demonstrate to your most significant people that you do want to build a reputation of being faithful. Faithfulness means to be trusted in all areas, not just the physical or occasional being there but this really means it goes to the matters of the heart. Faithfulness means that you can be depended upon to do what you have promised, to follow through on what your spouse or significant other has entrusted to you, and you build integrity and character demonstrating over and over again being a promise keeper. To be faithful means your spouse or family or friends can trust and be certain you will deliver on what you have promised.

In other words, this gift of faithfulness for 2015 means you will give this gift over and over again in some of the following ways: you will deliver on your promises; you will do chores or say yes to other daily requests from your significant person; you will be romantically and sexually pure to your spouse; you will stay within the agreed monthly budget and not be financially impulsive with ATM’s and spending; you will come home when promised; you will follow through on responsibilities you said you would do.

So this month, sit down with your spouse, friend, family member or your most significant others by making a commitment to each other that you will not allow anything to come between the two of you. Say words and follow through with action that you can be dependable, trustworthy, emotionally faithful, and prove over and over again that you will be a promise keeper. As you do this, you will demonstrate to be a person who practices faithfulness. Build trusting relationships in 2015 and build a reputation of faithfulness.